Talk:Running of the Bulls
Not even sure where to begin speculating about this one. TR (talk) 20:49, February 20, 2013 (UTC) :I'm going to take a wild guess and say it has something to do with classical mythology. More specifically . . . the Augean stables? Turtle Fan (talk) 02:58, February 21, 2013 (UTC) ::Well, since the image within the bull depicts what appears to be a human female serenely strangling what appears to be another human female (who is understandably unhappy), classical mythology is probably a good start. ::I'll be astonished if it's just some tourists' crazy adventures in Pamplona. TR (talk) 04:22, February 21, 2013 (UTC) :::It does look like Turtledove has begun to enjoy doing short stories again along with multi-book novels. ML4E (talk) 21:46, February 21, 2013 (UTC) This is scheduled to post on Wednesday (3/27/13). With LatA, a plot summary and google preview were available about 2 weeks prior to the date the story went up. Nothing like that here. Which is somewhat cool--the story's free and we're going to have plenty of opportunities to read it. On the other hand, the curiosity is driving me nuts. TR (talk) 00:20, March 23, 2013 (UTC) :That was charming. I can't imagine what his inspiration was, and never would have guessed the premise in a hundred years, but it gave us yet another solid tor.com short. As with the War Between the Provinces books and EIaK, I kept puzzling over some of the names. It didn't help that I'm not as well versed in Hemingway as I'd like to be. But at any rate, a fine story in its own right. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:57, March 29, 2013 (UTC) ::It does say how important Hemingway has to our culture that I was able to puzzle out the pastiche without ever having read The Sun Also Rises. I did spend a great deal of time wondering what the point was (changing characters names makes sense in pastiche, but why is changing place names in a story that seems utterly devoid of fantastic elements; why not just do Hemingway in "Uncle Alf" world or something), until we learned what the bulls actually were. That made it much more fun. Then we learned the big secret about the characters. And that made it much better still. Then it just sort of stopped. :::Secret? I'm afraid I missed that. You don't mean their species? He didn't really hit us over the head with it until well on, but there were clues, stray references to tails and scales and claws and the like. We didn't get a full picture, which was pretty inspired from an in-universe perspective: One doesn't describe normal human anatomy in a story written by humans for humans (which is of course to say, all of them). ::::Yeah, I meant their species. It was nicely gradual. Of course a working girl's nails might be long enough to be deemed claws, but then at some point they are talking about how "my snout's numb, my tail's numb"...oh, ok, that's what they are. :::One might of course wonder how it is that EVERYTHING should be so familiar in another species' society (and still more how there would be one exception, that Spain is not a Christian country; in light of all the rest, that was so unexpected that it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that Thimras the bull-headed deity is Mithras). But of course that's hardly the point. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:55, March 29, 2013 (UTC) ::::Definitely a story where the AH part is minor--HT clearly didn't start with "what if X happened in history?" but rather "you know what might be fun to write?" (I bring this up because the first comment posed at TOr.com was the usual "Turtledove hates butterflies" crap; I know the comments page is well-patrolled or might be inclined to be rude.) TR (talk) 17:22, March 29, 2013 (UTC) ::So while HT seemed to achieve what he wanted (even with my little Hemingway experience, I can see that the style is a pitch-perfect imitation; the build up to the surprises were well done) and it's probably one of his more successful works in terms of meeting authorial goals and intents, this is probably my least favorite Tor.com story. As you say, charming, but rather insubstantial. TR (talk) 15:45, March 29, 2013 (UTC) :::I would rank it ahead of "The Star and the Rockets" and "Vilcabamba." It doesn't begin to approach "The House That George Built" or "Lee at the Alamo," which planted a seed of interest in me that's now well on the way to becoming a research specialty, at least by the standards of an amateur pursuing something for my own interests. :::Oh, and it blows "Father of the Bride" out of the water. You want to talk about insubstantial, there's so little substance to tbat one that I'm really at a loss as to how to Wikify it at all. I'll get it up here, though. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:55, March 29, 2013 (UTC) Well that was interesting. I'm not sure how much of the foreshadowing was obvious and how much of it came from my having read some of the spoilers above (I stopped reading as soon as I realized but might have been too late), but it seemed clear to me that the narrator wasn't human pretty early. I read the The Sun Also Rises in high school English class and didn't like it (I preferred A Farewell to Arms the following year) but this was a pretty good pastiche. I think part of the inspiration for the beasties came from the work Turtledove did on "The Mrem Go West". ML4E (talk) 17:26, April 2, 2013 (UTC) :Could be re: "The Mrem Go West". HT himself left a note at Tor.com that he initially had the idea in the 1990s for Triceratops as the bulls, but the Mrem thing could have prompted story's completion now. TR (talk) 16:04, April 3, 2013 (UTC) ::So he did. I didn't read the comments after I finished the story. ML4E (talk) 18:01, April 4, 2013 (UTC) :Switching gears to articles for our project: Obviously, all the characters should get articles, but I don't know the best way to handle the geography. Unlike Derlavai or Detina, this world seems to be a 1:1 correspondence to ours. However, even if it isn't, I don't see much point in creating articles for, e.g., "Dubyook" when the total content will be "Baek Jarns was from Dubyook". So I would propose either we 1) just put "Dubyook" in the USA page with the appropriate redirect, or 2) create a page called "Geography in RotB" and just list the known countries (rather like the Provinces of the NAU page) with whatever information we have. TR (talk) 16:04, April 3, 2013 (UTC) ::I incline toward the latter. The United States is a political as well as a geographic entity. That's true to only a slightly lesser degree of France and Spain. However close the parallels may be, these fanciful governments cannot be used interchangeably with their real world inspirations. Turtle Fan (talk) 23:56, April 3, 2013 (UTC) ::I agree with the latter idea too. I think we will need two placename articles though, one for the town the POV went fishing and one for the town where the "bulls" are run. ML4E (talk) 18:01, April 4, 2013 (UTC) :::If we also give Sirap an article--and that's arguably justifiable--we can then give the countries a page. That's a nice consistent standard. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:06, April 7, 2013 (UTC) ::::But we'd still have the problem that we know nothing about most of the countries in question, and so we'd come up with really lame articles. 05:39, April 7, 2013 (UTC) :::::I don't think I explained clearly. I'm suggesting articles for each city, and one page for "Countries in RotB." Then a couple of bullets by each one. It would be on the lame side, true, but we have to do something, and I do think a page for all the countries and separate articles for each city is the best we'll come up with. Turtle Fan (talk) 21:42, April 7, 2013 (UTC) :::::::Oh, ok. Yeah, that's reasonably workable. TR (talk) 23:58, April 7, 2013 (UTC)